Books like The Strangler Vine

The White Tiger is a witty and searing portrayal of a “self-made” man who has risen from the depths of abject poverty to a position of wealth and influence. 

The India portrayed is far from the glitz and romantic notions of Bollywood. It is a desperately poor place where the “haves” live like kings and the “have-nots" live like slaves.

In addition to shedding light on some of the harsh realities of class, economics, and corruption in India, The White Tiger somehow manages to subvert expectations and coax the reader into rooting for a murderer and thief who justifies his actions, not entirely convincingly, by describing himself as a sort of working-class hero.

In reality, he is more of a cautionary tale.

The Far Pavilions is one of the most beautiful, culturally aware, historically accurate, and vivid books I’ve ever read, and I re-read it every few years.

I’ve loaned this book and not gotten it back so many times that I’m sure it’s still in print because of the number of copies I’ve had to buy to replace it. Based on the history of British direct rule in India, it tells the story of a young British boy raised as Indian by the nanny who saves his life during the Sepoy uprisings.

He struggles with having a foot in two worlds and not really belonging to either, and the author does a fantastic job of illustrating this. India truly comes alive.

Give me an array of spicy Indian food, a handsome hero, and a good Bollywood movie, and I’m set for the evening. But this book transported me to a different period in Indian history. I teetered on a cliff's edge as the intrigue and drama of Lin’s tale unfolded. 

The story moves from one heart-stopping incident to another as it transitions through the gritty criminal underworld, congested streets, and overcrowded slums of India in the 1980s. It gripped me from the beginning and kept my earpods glued to my ears until the end. It was one of the most compelling biographies I’ve ever listened to.

Set in the rugged and remote regions of Afghanistan and the Himalayas, this Rudyard Kipling book follows two British adventurers who seek to carve out their own kingdom among the native tribes. Their audacious quest for power and wealth in forbidden lands leads to a tragic unraveling of their ambitions.

Through vivid storytelling and rich symbolism, Kipling delves into themes of imperialism, cultural arrogance, and the clash between civilizations. The forbidden territories they seek to conquer serve as a backdrop for exploring the darker aspects of human ambition and colonialism, making it a seminal work in literature.

This book–and its extraordinary film adaptation by John Huston, starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine–is a recurring source of inspiration in my work.

There are some writers I read purely for the pleasure of a well-written sentence. Don is one of those, because he is a Literary Writer™ – he edited one of the premier literary journals for many years. But here’s the thing – he is also one hell of a plotter. This first novel of his caught the letters community by surprise, but not me; the intricate construction of his short stories could only lead to a tale as labyrinthine as this one. Featuring classic mystery tropes, Country of Origin is a missing person case that leads our hero, an American Embassy officer in Tokyo, to seedy strip clubs, dangerous love affairs, and the CIA, all delivered with surgical prose that would make Raymond Chandler blush.

Holly Black co-wrote the Spiderwick Chronicles and knows her stuff. I found this series of graphic novels extremely entertaining, and chillingly true to the old legends. Black takes old legends from several Eurocentric cultures and has them coexisting in one single city, as just people, trying to make it. Poor Rue, the main character, is only half-human. When she finds out her mother is one of "the good neighbors"-- a fairy princess, she has to venture to her grandfather's realm to find her, meanwhile, a swan maiden is murdered up the street, and nixies steal her boyfriend. The drama of the series was riveting, as were the legends she called upon.

When a horror thriller can straddle mystery and true crime and stick the landing like this book does, I’m in.

I was immediately invested in Liz’s journey back to her hometown. I love the reunion trope, but what Liz comes up against is so strange and intriguing that I knew after the opening I wasn’t putting this one down until I devoured this book. Her inner strength and determination to solve the town’s big mystery had me cheering for her every step of the way.

Oh, and I did not see that ending coming, OMG.

Manhattan Beach is less experimental and more conventional than Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad and The Candy House, but it is every bit as moving, rich, and textured as those justly celebrated novels, and it contains one of the most touching father/daughter relationships that I've ever encountered in fiction.

A historical novel set in Depression and World War II-era New York City, Manhattan Beach begins with almost 12-year-old Anna Kerrigan accompanying her rakish father, Eddie, on a mission to a wealthy gangster. A few years later, Eddie disappears after abruptly walking out on his family with no warning or explanation.

Has he been killed? Is he in hiding? Why did he abandon a family he ostensibly loved? Plucky, brave Anna devotes herself to the search for her missing father with the ingenuity and zeal of the detectives she reads about in fiction.

I reviewed Manhattan Beach for… show more.

Phantoms is an exceptional book. When two sisters discover that their hometown of Snowfield, CA is deserted, the reader is instantly pulled into the mystery. Koontz’s powerful description of finding homes deserted without warning, with dinner still on the table in some cases, is uncanny and unsettling. A masterful storyteller, Koontz adds special touches to increase a sense of the supernatural – voices coming from drain pipes, streetlights shattering, and even random bursts of music being heard over loudspeakers by the handful of survivors. The terror reaches a cosmic scale when Dr. Timothy Flyte recognizes the source of the supernatural events as humanity’s “ancient enemy” – a cunning being of massive size that has been feeding on mankind for centuries. I highly recommend this book if you need to stay awake all night!

Can you tell Beauty and the Beast is one of my favorite fairytales to read in all its retellings? This one is set in our modern world. It takes a look at the ugly side of bullying in high school, a murder mystery, ghosts, money extortion, lots of people keeping secrets, and through all of this, two people have to learn to see into each other’s hearts.